Board Update: Momentum

I am writing this last installment of the 2016–2017 Board of Directors update just hours before boarding my flight to attend HOPA’s 13th Annual Conference. It has been a busy year—as evidenced by the voluminous board agendas (more than 1,500 pages!), the number of external collaborations, the inaugural offering of HOPA’s Board Certified Oncology Pharmacist Recertification Program, the approval of the framework for a new committee structure, a bylaws review and update, and the incredible progress that our committees and several task forces have made to keep our strategic plan moving forward. The 1,000 words allotted to this update can never fully capture the extent of HOPA’s activities and progress.

The new committee structure will be implemented for the 2017–2018 HOPA year, and if you encounter references to the “final” structure (with quotation marks), it’s because we know that, as with any major structural change, some fine tuning will likely be needed along the way as the new committees and councils gain momentum. For an overview of the new structure and the opportunity to preview all of HOPA’s new volunteer opportunities, please visit the Volunteer Activity Center at hoparx.org, where we’ve recorded a 30-minute webinar to explain in some detail how the new structure is intended to work.

At our February meeting, the board approved the budget for the Leadership Development Committee’s Women in Leadership Summit, an invitation-only meeting to be held in conjunction with HOPA’s Practice Management Program in September 2017. The Summit will call together female leaders in the profession to describe the progress and gaps in leadership opportunities for women that are unique to oncology practice, and, even more important, to create an action plan so that HOPA’s Leadership Development Committee (which in the new structure is a subcommittee of the Governance Committee) can design programs to help strengthen members’ skills for meeting the specific challenges identified at the Summit.

Expanding the Resource Library has been and will continue to be an important strategy to support the Professional Resources and Tools goal in our strategic plan. To that end, the board also approved the charges and members’ skill-set requirements for an Oral Chemotherapy Educational Pamphlet Task Force; watch for these tools to be posted in the Resource Library in late summer 2017.

March marked the release of the “Time to Talk CINV” toolkit, an 18-month collaboration between HOPA, Eisai, and Helsinn. A study of patients and pharmacists undertaken in October 2015 to identify (mis)perceptions about chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting from both patients and oncology pharmacists led to the collaborative development of the toolkit. Please visit the Resource Library to download these tools for your practice; you can also watch a 30-minute webinar that provides more details about the tools.

The Standards Committee’s newest resource—Dose Rounding of Biologic and Cytotoxic Anticancer Agents: A Position Statement of the Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association—was approved by the board and is posted on the HOPA website. The committee has also finalized three guidance documents for groups of authors assigned to create HOPA standards, guidelines, and position papers. The documents will be instrumental in standardizing the appearance of each type of paper and will more clearly define timelines, deliverables, and expectations of all involved—authors, Standards Committee members, and board and staff liaisons—to ensure timely completion of these important tools for our members.

Several other tools are also near completion. A draft of the ASHP/HOPA Guidelines on the Role and Responsibilities of the Pharmacy Technician in Ambulatory Oncology Pharmacy will be released for comments by members of both the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists and HOPA in late spring 2017, with ultimate publication in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy planned for late 2017 after comments have been addressed and each organization’s board of directors has given approval. The Hematology/Oncology Pharmacist-Patient Task Force has also completed its charge to create patient-appropriate documents to help facilitate communication between patients and their oncology pharmacists; these documents are currently undergoing a revision to make them accessible to a wider range of patients and should be available in the Resource Library in late spring 2017 as well. The Scope of Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Practice (Part 2) Task Force has also made significant progress on granular details related to job descriptions, roles, and responsibilities that members frequently seek from one another; the task force met at HOPA headquarters in May to spend uninterrupted time writing. The Entry-Level Competencies in Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Practice Task Force has made excellent progress in meeting another frequent request from members: to better define expectations of pharmacy students or PGY-1 residents on oncology rotations. Notably, the group identified an opportunity to comment on the American College of Clinical Pharmacy’s Pharmacotherapy Didactic Curriculum Toolkit that was published in Pharmacotherapy in late 2016 and wrote a response regarding the recommendations for oncology teaching. The task force’s response letter was approved by the board and was published in the March 1, 2017, issue of Pharmacotherapy.

Our advocacy momentum continues to be strong. The board approved HOPA’s participation in the Pediatric Pharmacy Advocacy Group’s Pharmacy Vaccine Coalition through December 31, 2017, to lend our support in addressing the resurgence of the antivaccination movement, given the critical role that vaccines play in protecting cancer patients, and, in the case of the human papillomavirus vaccines, in cancer prevention. Some very important work has been completed by the Value of the Hematology/Oncology Pharmacist Task Force, which will lay the foundation for the new Research-Practice Outcomes and Professional Benchmarking Committee to help strengthen the evidence base as we advocate for inclusion in payment-reform models. A group of HOPA members participated in the 1-hour Voice of America radio program led by the Cancer Support Community on March 7, 2017, to advocate that patients use us more—you can listen to this at https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/97736/an-inside-look-at-the-pharmacists-role-in-cancer-care. Finally, look for a proceedings document to follow HOPA’s first policy summit focused on drug waste, held in Washington, DC, on May 8, 2017.

We have accomplished so much in 2016–2017; by the time you read this, HOPA’s 2017–2018 Board of Directors and our new committees will be in place—and I have no doubt that all our future leaders will keep this momentum going. It has been my pleasure to be on this journey with you during the past year.